Category Archives: Reflections

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When I walk with my daughter Maya in the woods, I’m often torn between two competing impulses. The urge to discover together and to explain — to point out the wonders of a worm or seed or changing leaf — does battle with the need for silence, for soaking it all in.

Letting Maya lead the way is a solution of sorts — she darts about, looking and poking, asking questions or not. Unlike the Waldorf teacher I spoke with this week, I don’t think facts about nature are a burden to the mind, and try to answer her — or look up new information — as I can. She is a budding naturalist, at any rate, always wondering what different animals eat, where seeds live in the dirt, and which sprouts in the lawn are the onion grass she knows she can munch on.

Amidst the lessons, though, there is still the mysterious mystery, as she put it the other day. There is a quiet place where information is not the point. And ensuring that children get into the woods in an unmediated way — and have a direct confrontation with Life (and our relevance or irrelevance to its systems) — is essential.

Years back, I wrote a poetic response to Mary Oliver’s wonderful poem, Wild Geese, that hits upon these themes, and I thought of it again recently as the spring weather has brought us more time playing outdoors.

The argument from design

begins with meticulous veins in this mulberry leaf and ends with God. But I say it’s a long way from lichen to leaf to omniscience, and in that journey one must account

for sea creatures that reproduce without sex, whatever sense that makes, and for mass extinctions, the great blow-ups and die-offs, and where does silliness come from in this telling?

It’s so serious to look at an oak and find the how and why we’re here that I can’t bear to live in such a place, under a heavy hand signing itself by virtue of its own complexity

mistaking a system which lives and dies with reasons for living and dying — origins, organs knit together, entangled like only tautologies are. Too easy lessons stolen

from the absent quiet of the woods, or unwitting peace of geese and wind above a pond. I fail to see how it explains the central flaw of us, our

pained self-consciousness. A garden without us is no feat at all, yet there’s no hint of plans for us inside

that vague, enormous mind. Instead, the delicate web, reliant on knowing all reasons. And why make something so delightful just to hand it,

As you may have heard, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled in McCutcheon v. FEC that wealthy individuals cannot be limited in the overall amount they can give to political candidates. The First Amendment, which last time I checked does not mention money at all, allegedly now bars any limitation on the total amount of moola that rich folks can shovel in the direction of elected officials.

The 5-to-4 decision split along political lines and overturned decades of settled law, as well as many state limits grounded in anti-corruption principles. The majority decision is rife with such broad (and utterly daffy) generalizations about the nature of speech and political life that it also makes clear that the Court is frighteningly likely, in the not-so-distant future, to strike down any kind of contribution limit.

The former aggregate contribution limit of merely $123,000 per federal election was such a drag on my own political giving, as I’m sure it was on yours. I totally had more money than that saved up to spend on every election cycle (I’ve been clipping coupons!), and I’m glad to see that all that green stuff I have laying around in piles can finally go to good use buying influence for my pet projects.

In truth, out of a country of 314 million, only 1,300 people maxed out the prior cap on political contributions in the last election cycle. What a crisis! I can see why the Supremes thought this decision was worth their time.

Of course, some of these large donors may be cursing the outcome, as their phones are already ringing off the hook, and now they won’t be able to escape pols’ persistent dial-a-thons until they’ve dished out $3.2 million, or 30 times the old limit. As Lawrence Lessig put it on Diane Rehm this morning, the decision narrowed the number of people who are at all politically relevant in the money race from the old high of a mere 120,000 people to an even smaller pool of 40,000, or about the number of people in the U.S. named Sheldon.

The Court’s majority opinion is an activist one in the classic sense, yet is oddly disingenuous about its impact on established law. The majority is also not above boot-strapping: yesterday’s decision relies on the secret flow of campaign funds created by Citizens United as a basis for taking down yet more limits, without acknowledging the situation was actually created by the Court.

And in a hypocritical break with oft-hyped principles of constitutional textualism, the Court ignored a key brief filed by Lessig that analyzed the Framer’s uses of the term “corruption,” instead delivering a decision out-of-step with the historical record. Indeed, the case is a harbinger of bad decisions to come because it signals that a key idea — that political money can create an “appearance of corruption” — has evaporated as a matter of law.

Even the dissenters appeared surprised that the Court’s official definition of political corruption now contains only outright bribery. (In fact, the erosion began when then-Solicitor General Elana Kagan threw a key case on appearance of corruption under the bus during the oral argument for Citizens United. Now the damage from abandoning a broader description for political corruption is plain.)

Still, cramped legal arguments aside, the level of cluelessness from the conservative majority about how Washington already more-or-less operates is breathtaking. What we all know in our hearts to be true is actually the case, and not just on House of Cards. To state the painfully obvious: I’ve been in a room in the Congress with a handful of big-money political donors, and seen with my own eyes how their influence is greater than that of 1000 mere voters, even when the money is merely in the background, and not on the table. These are the folks that Roberts thinks need protecting because they are despised — you know, like flag-burners and Nazis.

What he fails to acknowledge is that they are at the heart of the system, not its outskirts. The rich get different meetings, including sometimes in the Oval Office or with committee chairs, and with actual elected officials instead of staff flunkies. They get their phone calls returned, promptly. Meanwhile the rest of us, even those lucky Washingtonians who are officially designated advocates working on issues that a member of Congress or two is supposedly interested in, twiddle our thumbs, waiting around nervously for a return call like a shy schoolgirl from the 1950s.

As a 2012 brilliant TAL episode on the Washington shake-down pointed out, the open secret in Washington is that elected officials need donors more than donors (except, perhaps, the most craven ones) need them. The parties impose fundraising quotas on everyone, including specific levels of money to be raised by new members, committee chairs, and for leadership positions, and every lawmaker also must raise their own dough or look like a sitting duck. The post-Citizens United explosion in Super-PAC spending made this considerably worse — making every candidate more insecure because any one of them could face unknown amounts of last-minute spending by shadowy front groups.

Lifting the aggregate limits, as the Court just did in McCutcheon, may be even more damaging than the inevitable move to eliminate the remaining limits on direct contributions to candidates. Why? Because it substantially raises the potential value of very wealthy donors for larger groups of party electeds. The value of a donor, in the mind of every politician, is their ability to give early and often to the enterprise. Being able to turn-key a political gift to another pol through a joint fund-raising committee or other means is almost as good — and in some cases, might be even better — than collecting it for yourself, because it creates a new ally and obligation while supporting the party. Back-scratching, log-rolling, call it what you will — that’s the actual coin of the realm.

These factors also explain the inherent limits in the power of small donors under the current set of operating rules. And while the growth in smaller donors has been significant in Presidential elections, smaller gifts are harder to collect in less-publicized races. Even the recent efforts to organize smaller donations would have been unlikely to take root without many of the very reforms being struck down by the Court, reforms that, for a brief time, required political parties to look elsewhere besides to the rich and powerful for funds.

The major push for collecting political money emanates from and around Washington, not from individuals clamoring in the marketplace of ideas to be heard, as Roberts and his ilk conjure up in the opinion. When I was, briefly, a legislative director for an organization with a small PAC, I suddenly started getting voicemails from elected officials on my personal cell phone. “Hi, I’m Representative So-and-so,” they would say. “I would really love to talk with you about coming to my event next week.” After a decade of working around Washington advocating on important issues of public health, it was gratifying that actual members of Congress were now so keenly interested in my “political speech”!

I actually don’t fault politicians: it’s currently impossible to know who is really in Congress for the right reasons, because this is how we define their job. But the notion that this kind of routine exchange between two functionaries — sickening, undignified, and clearly self-interested in the narrowest sense — is about anybody’s First Amendment freedom is ludicrous. It’s a classic shake-down, often loathed by both sides, and legalized by an elaborate tap-dance that keeps everyone, barely, on the right side of what otherwise might look a lot like bribery.

Thankfully, in our own dear country (unlike in many places around the world) there is no shortage of political speech, either through money or the more traditional act of actually speaking. If anything, we talk our problems to death, until the solutions expire of boredom and inaction. Instead, the problem with the ineffectiveness of our politics has been, to mangle George Orwell, that some folks’ speech is more equal than others’.

Those who oppose change are often the ones who have the most to gain from stasis. So it makes sense that amassed wealth is inherently anti-reform, both because money represents a victory under the current rules of the game, and because the wealthy have the most — quite literally — to lose. When lawmakers’ livelihoods are roped inextricably to the continued success of the wealthy donors they must court to stay in office and keep their standing in Congress, there is little doubt that democracy has been replaced with something else, and that real change, no matter how justified, will be far harder to achieve.

Already in America, rich folks live more than a decade longer than the poor. While Roberts is waxing poetic about the First Amendment needing to pad further protections around the wealthiest .0004 percent (or 1300 out of 314 million), we must be building a movement for real and lasting change.

Although I’d been a skeptic on this strategy prior to this moment, I’m now hoping that the Court’s latest boneheaded decision will be enough to jump-start a social movement for a Constitutional Amendment clarifying that corporations really are not people and that the First Amendment doesn’t mean “freedom of money” when it clearly just says “freedom of speech.”

Without these eminently reasonable clarifications, we’ll have a Constitution and a Congress that only work for corporations and the very, very rich. While it’s a long haul to get an Amendment passed, where the Court is headed is clear. We can start to fight today, or lose our country as we know it someday soon.

I spent last week in California, traveling for work. I was lucky enough to be staying in Aptos, on the coast. We saw dolphins swimming by the shore, and the weather was perfect.

I was talking about the surreality of California’s climate and the oddly filtered quality of the light there with a new friend, when I suddenly recalled a poem I wrote many years ago on the exact subject, right after moving to California to go to law school and finding the adjustment from the East Coast a bit more than I expected.

So here you are, a displacement poem. Let’s say it’s to note the pleasure of making a new friend, of the kind that instantly leads to candid, vulnerable conversation.

Living in California

Orion is not where I left him, wistfully boarding my plane to the West.
At dusk, the Palo Alto air surprises, dropping ten degrees,

erasing daylight with a chill. Winter brings green tendrils to these starving hills like some absurdist variant of spring.

Among the jagged palms and eucalyptus, sawdust tricks the air
with pine and musty rot.

I’ve lost some paper that explained all this to me — when and why to tilt my head, bring a sweater or wear shorts.

Visceral signs of my curious fit with the weather, drenching storms that have no rage, no crystal shocks of lightning, their flair and mortal flash.

Sun is leveraged here against a spotless sky. The clarity of things is no surprise, and few remark on gorgeous days.

This diffuse, democratic light induces generosity, but seldom edges, or a need for hats, for gloves, a million

useless things, my understanding of the permanence of stars, a spatial lesson that I did not know I knew,

that somehow still displaces me within this wider sky,
these well-intended, lovely days.

For a break from train derailments and chemical rules, I thought I’d share a taste of our recent spates of summertime fun.

Until the last few weeks or so, there wouldn’t have been much to post. I’ve generally been working longer hours, and Maya was attending BuilderBee camp, where she evidently enjoyed gluing things. I have no idea where to store the impressive but awkwardly shaped 3-by-3-foot posterboard city she toted home.

A few weeks back, we went with Grandpa around sunset to a small beach on the Potomac River by Gunston Hall. The pictures were lit by what real photographers call the magic hour (and I call a good excuse to put the camera on the “auto” setting):

Some Monarchs were drinking water by alighting on sand:

We also managed to crunch out a few Saturdays back by toodling up to a yoga education and retreat center in Olney, MD, that also happens to grow pick-your-own organic blueberries. Sadly, the birds had lain waste to the ripe ones, so pickings were slim. But we enjoyed the exercise, including a bright infestation of caterpillars and a surprising and unusual display of color coordination in the toddler’s wardrobe:

Last, but really not least, I braved the skies with the two-year-old and we had a lovely time in Denver for a combo work and vakay trip. We went up the gondola in Steamboat Springs, had an incredibly tasty dinner stream-side at the picturesque Sweetpea Market, picked up goodies at the charming Saturday farmer’s market, and even caught up with a small-town rodeo, which was delightful once I made a concerted decision to look past the animal cruelty issues and enjoy the change in culture.

Maya had a blast doing the “ram scramble,” which actually involved a lamb with a ribbon around its neck being chased through the thick dirt by the under-5 set. She didn’t even come close to winning, but was exhilarated by the bright lights of the rodeo ring.

As we were too far away for good shots of bucking broncos, I mainly took pics of those waiting to ride and the charming kids in their cowboy boots. (And no, I did not add sepia tone via Instagram — my beloved Colorado actually looks this way around sunset. Sigh.)

We also had lunch at my favorite restaurant for super-healthy food, Watercourse Foods, stopped in briefly at the excellent Denver Museum of Natural History, which Maya loved, and visited a working ranch only a few dozen miles from downtown Denver, where the livestock are maintained as they should be and the out buildings are decorated with whimsical figures.

Hope you’re having a great summer — look for an upcoming post on greening your kitchen, including why a ’70s coffee pot is the right no-plastic solution and deserves a second look!

This happens so often that we actually have guides from media organizations and psychologists about how to talk to our kids about school shootings, like this one from MSNBC. There’s also a general one from PBS that covers disturbing news. They may be useful to those with older kids than Maya, though I don’t envy any parent that tries to explain how and why this can happen.

While everyone else has basically given up on bringing sensible gun policy to the U.S., the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence has kept on going. If you’re as mad and upset as I am, you might think about sending them some love.

For my part, words fail me, for once. Just watching the news and crying…

And, most poignant of all for me, we remembered and celebrated the long, fascinating life of my great-uncle, Russell MacCleery. Here’s what I read aloud about him at our service for family and friends up in Canada:

About Russell

He was a man who knew his way around a story. He also knew his way around Washington, around a farm, around the state capitol in New Hampshire and other states, the backroads of New Brunswick. He could shake the hand of a Senator, and then put on overalls and shingle a roof.

He was larger than life. He was born before women could vote, just five years after the first Model T car rolled off the line. In his life, he saw suffrage for women, two World Wars, the sprawling of highways all over the country, civil rights, a car in every garage, and so many transformations over a century of accelerating change.

He worked permanent things into the landscape. Some of the things he created in Washington, I have tried to undo. I couldn’t. They became, by his intention, part of the political structure, embedded.

He loved beautiful places. He fell in love with New Brunswick as a boy and it always got the better part of him, in a way. He was most himself here. He had lifelong friends, and family sitting all around, to hear his stories. And paint cans in the living room, and a box of frosting I once found in his kitchen from the 1950s.

I have sat for hours, listening to him. He could speak for hours! It was exhausting sometimes, actually. And now, I think back on those hours, and don’t regret a minute.

I miss his voice, that sudden guffaw, his good humor, even the anger he still carried towards my grandmother for making him do chores when he wanted to go out to a dance with Sanford instead, more than seventy years ago.

He had a way with a story, even one that told us more than he intended.

He was a natural historian, and capable of so many things, versatile, someone equally at home with cows and politicians.

There are few people with that capacity. I admired him, loved him like the grandfather I never knew, and miss him terribly, both the stories he told us, often more than once, and all those stories we will never hear again.

Yesterday at the pool, the air had a bite to it, causing both Maya and me to keep as much of our bodies submerged as we could, to the point of bobbing awkwardly just below the water line, stretched out in the baby pool.

And today after the rain cleared, the warmth largely went with it. At the park, it was possible to think of a light sweater with distinct longing.

In my small world, this end of summer has a pronounced bitter-sweetness. Maya is starting preschool in two weeks. It is a particular kind of beginning, the first year in which there is no “back” in back to school.

Up to this point, she’s been cared for by us, by a nanny and relatives based out of our home, which I realize is a very sheltered life. She’s never been to the hurly-burly of daycare, and has spent relatively little time around other children, with the exception of the four close-by cousins with whom she’s officially obsessed.

Hence, this beginning maintains an edge. It is an actual beginning, which is a rare thing, since most are colored by similar events before them.

And while I doubt that her play-based Reggio, two-days-a-week, co-op preschool bears much resemblance to Lord of the Flies, it nonetheless is the first time in which social consciousness may begin to be a force in the formation of her personality. Until now, she has never been:

late;

laughed at by others or teased;

embarrassed;

called upon to perform a particular task at a particular time;

asked to conform her day to a predetermined schedule;

spent any considerable time in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people;

been characterized as anything by other people within earshot of her, etc.

In short, for Maya this is the start of a social mode of being that is utterly novel, in a real sense. It comes with embedded expectations of her, and eventually, for her.

Of course, even without preschool, by age three, many of these things likely should have occurred, and would have occurred. But the advent of preschool marks them with clarity, and even allows us some attention and ceremony around them.

And it does feel like a loss of freedom, even for me as an instigator and second-hand observer. Today in the car, Nina Simone’s powerful anthem of unfettered naturalism, Feeling Good, came on, stirred up by the magic of shuffle:

Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel

Fish in the sea you know how I feel
River running free you know how I feel
Blossom on the tree you know how I feel

It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life
For me
And I’m feeling good

Contrast that with my much-beloved Adrienne Rich’s almost-clinical telling of the costs and benefits of a truly liminal moment:

Prospective Immigrants, Please Note

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through there is always the risk of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen.

…

Of course, in the Rich poem, our courageous immigrant has a choice, and Maya has none. As parents, we hold all the choices still, and merely hope we’ve chosen well.

Then again, about growing up and, more tragically, starting to see ourselves with the double lens of how we are perceived by others, none of us have agency. I recall in high school, when we were encouraged to read a number of bildungsroman – novels about the passage from childhood or adolescence to the long twilight of adult life.

There is so much literary talent and attention spent on this moment, and so little on the earliest transition from a self-directed to a social being, perhaps because this initial stepping forth into the world happens alongside our meaningful first uses of language, and even prior to real memory. But if there is an “age of innocence,” surely this is it.

About school, I have as much ambivalence as most likely do. I remain deeply appreciative of certain teachers, and still have some friends from those faraway days. Yet when I think about it for any length of time, I also relive the harshness and bureaucracy of it: the way we watched those fundamentally humanitarian John Hughes films for clues about how to find, we hoped, our own comic forms of justice in all the petty mess.

Without learning and context, of course, we could never appreciate the transcendent. But still, as Maya enters the fray, stepping into the mundane of scheduling and schoolmates, I wonder to myself how to preserve her current intense presence in the world.

I once wrote a short poem, about an older girl tussling with these late-summer impulses and threats, poised in self-discovery. I was that girl, and the memory of bicycling up that steep incline is as clear as yesterday’s sunlight over the pool.

Gospel

Serious child, it is September.
You are bossing your bike up

this hill, and worried for school.
Summer has you in her long arms

still, and her permissiveness
seems natural. She goes on musing

in your ear of mushrooms, sprung
from sleepy lawns, demure

and shining in the late light, echoing
an early moon. Or of last Sunday,

foreign in a Baptist church,
when sudden angels trilled

their brilliant wings, and took you,
for the first time, from yourself.

The highlight for me was today’s lunchtime conversation with Katie Couric, who was insightful, substantive, funny, honest and warm. I hope that her new daytime program finds the viewers it deserves, both because it sounds great and because its success would flag the need for smarter programming for both women and television talk shows generally.

Second, I loved meeting all of these interesting, talented women. At lunch, I just happened to be sitting next to Globetrotting Mama, who recently completed (and blogged about) a year-long trip around the world with her family. She was full of practical advice about how to take that kind of a trip, and really clear about its value for her two sons and their family bonds.

Then, as the coup de grace when things were winding down this afternoon, I stumbled upon Beth Terry, one of my personal eco-heroines, who just published an incredible book, My Plastic Free Life. I’ll be posting a book review soon, thanks to my newly purchased (and signed!) copy. Beth and I had lots to talk about!

Below are a few things I think I learned (subject of course to your review, correction and further explication):

Blogging is just one platform for increasing social influence. While it may be the heart of what you do, as it is for this wonderful blogger who led my workshop, in the end its traffic, readership demographics, time of stay, etc., measures just one form of social media footprint. Your value will be judged by the total picture across platforms, i.e., your blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc. As this implies, shortcomings in one platform can be compensated for by connections and influence in another.

Metrics and stats matter. This is true not only because they will help to measure your social influence (what old timey poli-sci types call “social capital”), but because you can and should use them to see what kinds of materials, posts and tweets gets your community revved up and rarin’ to go. Then you can give them more of the good stuff they like, and, if you’re lucky, the virtuous cycle takes over.

Social influence =’s trust in you. There are two main pathways to monetizing your activities, neither of which are really about your blog so much as they are about your social influence, and marketing you: 1) becoming a trusted, reliable marketing pathway for products and services (sponsorships, product reviews, give-aways and all that); 2) becoming a trusted, reliable expert on an issue or segment of the market, which can include freelance writing or a book, and/or selling yourself as a spokesperson or writer on other platforms or to traditional media. For both, you need the basic materials in your “media kit,” and the saucy Cecily K even gave us a link to her terrific guide for using picmonkey to make one. (I’m mainly in the second bucket, if I’m in any bucket at all. As both Cecily and the incredibly helpful Marcy Massura pointed out, if you’re pitching yourself as a writer, obviously including published clips and highlighting those in the kit is key.)

Be your best self. Despite the sneers that mommy bloggers often surreptitiously receive, expectations for people working in this space, unsurprisingly, are the same as in any other profession. You’re ideally supposed to be organized, professional, truthful, be aware of and follow the law, and generally be nice.

There are a truly unfair number of platforms, technologies, applications and measuring systems to try to get your head around. Of course they also change all the time. In one session alone, panelists mentioned Klout, Peer Index, Cred, Alexa, and Picmonkey. Others talked about Google Analytics, Google+, Survey Monkey, instagram and Tumblr. Many of these are useful tools, I’m sure, but I was unnerved by visions of myself floating aimlessly from platform to platform managing my Interwebs identity, and wondered when the writing and research might actually get done to make decent content.

Connections, as in anything, still matter. But making connections, thanks to the unabashed, and even sometimes forced, intimacy of Twitter, is now far easier than ever before. From panel to panel, the advice was the same: be bold in approaching people, once you know what you want to accomplish and have your materials and story straight. Talk up your strengths and value, and advocate for yourself and your ideas.

Be inventive with DIY publicity and promotions. In the book talk, one very crafty craft blogger shared her kamikaze marketing tactics, which included calling up the sewing machine company featured in her novel for a give-away, barnstorming the book signings of authors she liked to build goodwill towards her own book blurbs, and holding workshops with the purchase of her book built into the cost. Another made satirical videos to promote her book, as well as educational guides for schools. The takeaway was that the more channels and promotional avenues you have for your content, the better.

There are a lot of people trying to do this, and (understandably) to make some money at it, and it’s not easy to do it well. While the Expo Hall was full of potential sponsors who want to engage the viral marketing potential of female bloggers and their audiences, it also seemed clear that the number of people who will dramatically succeed – at least enough to make a living at it – is far smaller than the number of us interested in making a go at it.

Many people just use the Web – and blogging and other social media – for connection, personal journaling, and to give voice to fears and feelings. There was the wonderful woman I met who blogs about her depression and thoughts of suicide anonymously but courageously, and the woman with an autistic child who studies and writes about the science on autism. Blogs are places to share, build community, and get a comforting and perhaps even therapeutic confirmation that the things about us that make us feel alone are almost always things that other people are experiencing right now.

This avenue for expression is not going away. It remains a very powerful way to find like-minded people and to give a thousand voices to the many ways we navigate our lives. While there were nice breaks for informal networking, if I had one suggestion for the next BlogHer, it would be that there should also be space on the official calendar for like-minded bloggers to find each other, so that they can better get to know each other in-person and discuss common interests. BlogHer could be a place to create networks across many more spaces – with less being talked to, and more talking to each other. In this kind of space, bloggers could hatch ideas to help each other out, pooling technical or other expertise, or maybe even share their ideas for changing the world to reflect the many things we all dream of and hope for, both on-line and off.

###

What did you get out of the conference? What nuggets of wisdom do you have on the event or blogging in general? I’d love to hear!

What we read in nature is intention. Forgetful observers of
any mountain, appearing in our dreams, like thirty-six scenes
by Hokusai. Prussian blue water, tiny people
repairing the roof of their store, or celebrating blowsy

cherry blossoms. Their faces are smudged so as to make them
us. No one dancing at the picnic sees the fragile flowers,
or the mountain, that pale triangle marooned
in middle sky which forbodes nothing.

There is a storm. In two gravel-handed woodcuts
Mt. Fuji is angry, split by lava-red lightning, or wholly lit
with the passion of weather. It is possible to view the mountain
thirty-six times and never see it. There is the matter of

backdrop, some fish on the line, a hole in the roof again
this rainy Tuesday. There is the problem of distance, how we
look across and cannot comprehend. We stop to drink, the cup
is inexhaustible, then dry.

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Laura & Maya

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I'm a mom, consumer advocate and self-proclaimed nerd for news on health, safety, green living, food and politics. What happens when a public interest lawyer finally has her own child to think about? Follow me, and find out.

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